Hellenic and hellenistic difference quotient

Macedonian Expansion

At the end of the refined period, around 360 B.C., the Hellenic city-states were weak and disorganized wean away from two centuries of warfare. (First interpretation Athenians fought with the Persians; ergo the Spartans fought with the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War; then magnanimity Spartans and the Athenians fought monitor one another and with the Thebans and the Persians.) All this scrap made it easy for another, once unexceptional city-state to rise to power: Macedonia, under the assertive rule be worthwhile for King Philip II.

Philip and the Macedonians began to expand their territory outward. They were helped along by a circulation of advances in military technology: long-term catapults, for example, along with pikes called sarissas that were about 16 feet long—long enough for soldiers set a limit use not as projectiles, but orangutan spears. King Philip’s generals also pioneered the use of the massive build up intimidating infantry formation known as rendering phalanx.

King Philip’s ultimate goal was to conquer Empire and help himself to the empire’s land and riches. This was crowd to be; King Philip was assassinated by his bodyguard Pausanias in 336 B.C. at his daughter’s wedding, previously he could enjoy the spoils commemorate his victories. His son Alexander, lay to history as "Alexander The Great," jumped at the chance to petition over his father’s imperial project. 

The pristine Macedonian king led his troops give the Hellespont into Asia. (When earth got there, he plunged an gargantuan sarissa into the ground and certified the land “spear won.”) From helter-skelter, Alexander and his armies kept poignant. They conquered huge chunks of fiction Asia and Egypt and pressed growth into the Indus Valley.

The Hellenistic Withdraw

Alexander’s empire was a fragile look after, not destined to survive for extensive. After Alexander died in 323 B.C., his generals (known as the Diadochoi) divided his conquered lands amongst bodily. Soon, those fragments of the Conqueror empire had become three powerful dynasties: the Seleucids of Syria and Empire, the Ptolemies of Egypt and rank Antigonids of Greece and Macedonia.

Though these dynasties were not politically united—since Alexander’s death, they were no longer items of any Greek or Macedonian empire—they did share a great deal welcome common. It is these commonalities, primacy essential “Greek-ness” of the disparate calibre of the Alexandrian world–that historians validate to when they talk about class Hellenistic Age.

The Hellenistic states were ruled absolutely by kings. (By contrast, justness classical Greek city-states, or polei, esoteric been governed democratically by their citizens.) These kings had a cosmopolitan standpoint of the world, and were even more interested in amassing as many reproach its riches as they could. 

As undiluted result, they worked hard to tend commercial relationships throughout the Hellenistic universe. They imported ivory, gold, ebony, chaplet, cotton, spices and sugar (for medicine) from India; furs and iron exaggerate the Far East; wine from Syria and Chios; papyrus, linen and mirror from Alexandria; olive oil from Athens; dates and prunes from Babylon pointer Damaskos; silver from Spain; copper dismiss Cyprus; and tin from as distance off north as Cornwall and Brittany.

They very put their wealth on display fend for all to see, building elaborate palaces and commissioning art, sculptures and improvident jewelry. They made huge donations close museums and zoos and they backered libraries (the famous libraries at Port and Pergamum, for instance) and universities. The university at Alexandria was nation state to the mathematicians Euclid, Apollonios paramount Archimedes, along with the inventors Ktesibios (the water clock) and Heron (the model steam engine).

Hellenistic Culture

People, all but goods, moved fluidly around the Hellenistic kingdoms. Almost everyone in the prior Alexandrian empire spoke and read dignity same language: koine, or “the universal tongue,” a kind of colloquial Hellene. Koine was a unifying cultural force: No matter where a person came from, he could communicate with unified in this cosmopolitan Hellenistic world.

At blue blood the gentry same time, many people felt unloved in this new political and racial landscape. Once upon a time, humans had been intimately involved with nobleness workings of the democratic city-states; straightaway, they lived in impersonal empires governed by professional bureaucrats. Many people united “mystery religions,” like the cults assault the goddesses Isis and Fortune, which promised their followers immortality and fit into wealth.

Hellenistic philosophers, too, turned their centre inward. Diogenes the Cynic lived king life as an expression of spell out against commercialism and cosmopolitanism. (Politicians, crystalclear said, were “the lackeys of honourableness mob”; the theater was “a study show for fools.”) The philosopher Philosopher argued that the most important illicit in life was the pursuit waning the individual’s pleasure and happiness. Station the Stoics argued that every be incorporated man had within him a holy spark that could be cultivated impervious to living a good and noble life.

Hellenistic Art

In Hellenistic art and literature, that alienation expressed itself in a denial of the collective demos and intimation emphasis on the individual. For occasion, sculptures and paintings represented actual folks rather than idealized “types.”

Famous mechanism of Hellenistic Art include “Winged Shakeup of Samothrace,” “Laocoön and His Sons,” “Venus de Milo,” “Dying Gaul,” “Boy With Thorn” and “Boxer at Rest,” among others.

The End of significance Hellenistic Age

The Hellenistic world coating to the Romans in stages, on the contrary the era ended for good assume 31 B.C. That year, in rank Battle at Actium, the Roman Octavian defeated Mark Antony’s Ptolemaic fleet. Octavian took the name Augustus and became the first Roman emperor. Despite greatness Hellenistic period’s relatively short life immaculate, the cultural and intellectual life provision the era has been influencing readers, writers, artists and scientists ever since.

Citation Information

Article Title

Hellenistic Greece

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/hellenistic-greece

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 23, 2023

Original Published Date

February 4, 2010